Respect for Any Body Size | Women at Work | Podcast

0:00Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes.

0:41Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Body size is on my mind because I'm constantly, I'm thinking about how I present myself and how I'm perceived and how I can climb my own career ladder. And, you know, why haven't I had success in some areas and wondering whether or not people are listening to me or hearing me or thinking that I have, you know, leadership presence so that I can be considered for other opportunities and even be promoted. Nina's a diversity and inclusion manager. In that job, she strives to create an environment where everybody's accepted, no matter who they are, including their race, age, gender, and weight.

1:30Personally, though, she says she's been fighting to stay a size 12. Oh, gosh. The fight is, I think part of it is because I'm mad at the clothing industry. It's very hard to find clothes for work and going out and everything in those, in a 14, not even the 24s and the 26s, but even in a size 14. And so trying to not go higher than 12 so I don't have to struggle with the clothing and being uncomfortable and not feeling confident. That's how she felt going back to work after having a baby. When you're pregnant, people have lots of empathy. After you're pregnant, people are just like, what's wrong with you?

2:15Why isn't the baby weight melting off? And you know, I was in a training position where I did orientation every few weeks. And so I'm in front of people and I want to wear a suit and look professional and energetic and have people take me seriously. And I'm worried about, you know, parts of me spilling out. She also started worrying about not fitting a mold. I feel like there's so many leaders around me who are thin. Thin women. And I have never had a moment where someone said to me, you know, you're a mess, get it together. but certainly seeing women, the women around me who are in leadership positions, even, you know, the top women, um, at my previous employer demanding careers, decades of accomplishments and all, you know, thin and wearing certain designer clothes.

3:08And so they've achieved all this and never gained 20 pounds. And even when they had their kids or did stress eating. And so it may not have been in the form of someone saying to me, I can't promote you because you look a certain way. But it was in the messaging of the women who were in leadership roles around me. But now that she's in the leadership position, just as she is, Nina's not sure how much longer she'll keep up that fight to stay a size 12. Because I think that there are some things that just naturally happen with age and with menopause. I know I have to adjust. I'm going to try and accept my body, but also not completely give up.

3:52I'm still going to fight for my flexibility and my mobility and to find clothes that make me feel good and fit well. And then I come into the office and people are like, that woman knows what she's talking about. She looks the part. She sounds the part. Yes. And it's going to be an everyday thing. That's what I have realized. But I don't want to beat myself up. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Gallo. I'm Amy Bernstein, and I have been where Nina is. She's not the only woman who's well aware that being in a larger body means living amid people's weight bias and its consequences.

4:38And Nina's only a size 12. Two-thirds of women in the U.S. wear a larger size than that. Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

5:17Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

5:33Being above what many health care providers consider a quote-unquote normal weight has economic costs for women. A study out of Vanderbilt University found that overweight women, regardless of the type of work they do, make 4 % less than women of normal weight. For obese women, that penalty is 5.8%. For morbidly obese women, it's 15.7%. That same study highlighted how women who are obese are less likely than normal weight women to have jobs that put them in front of clients and customers. That behind-the-scenes work pays less, approximately 22.3 % less, than work that involves negotiating or public speaking or consulting of some sort.

6:19And for the heaviest women who do hold those roles, the pay gap is greater. They make 34.5 % less on average than normal weight women who are in the same type of client-facing jobs. Men, on the other hand, aren't hidden or shortchanged like that. Obese men, on average, don't earn any less than normal weight men. And overweight men, in fact, earn a little more. And those are only the financial consequences. We're going to get into the many other ones, like the mental toll, guided by two women who have put a lot of thought into what anti-fat bias is about and how to reduce it, not reinforce it. Grace Lemon is a management professor at DePaul's Business School.

7:05She recently published a roundup of the research findings on how larger-bodied workers are stigmatized. In that paper, she writes about the damage caused by stereotypes, widespread misunderstanding of how weight works, and certain kinds of wellness programs. She wants more organizations to confront the stigma through interventions that raise awareness of it. Which is exactly what Dr. Habiba Williams, she has a doctorate in nursing, did at the student health clinic where she used to work. Today she's a nurse practitioner at the University of Virginia's inpatient abdominal transplant unit. She's here along with Grace to help us understand our role in creating a positive body culture.

7:48Grace Habiba, thank you both for joining us. Oh, thank you so much. Yes, thank you so much for having me. Grace, let me start with you. How is it that you came to understand weight bias, especially the weight bias against women as the problem it is? For me, it was really seeing weight bias outside the lens of economic bias. I've known for a while that when you are in a larger body, you're going to have worse outcomes at work in terms of things like pay, promotions, and performance ratings. because this echoes what we see with other marginalized groups. If a stereotype attached to you relates to incompetence in any way like we might see for a woman or for an older person then it ultimately creates this economic disadvantage for you.

8:38But what I did not personally grasp and really helped me see the expanse of the problem was the interpersonal, the person-to-person mistreatment that goes on at work when you are in a larger body and the fallout from that mistreatment. So in my research, I found some 75 % of people who self-identify as overweight reported experiencing weight-based mistreatment, incivility, name-calling, bullying, microaggressions in the past six months explicitly because of their weight. And this was really jarring to me, But even more jarring was the repercussions. You, of course, when you're mistreated at work, might feel that burning shame, that immediate burning shame.

9:26But that was the tip of the iceberg. People who had been... Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade Electrolytes, Zero Sugar, and Vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

10:03Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. who were stigmatized because of their weight at work, reported making career-altering decisions because of that experience, leaning out at work, saying no to challenging work, saying no to promotions. I saw people report self-harm, drug use, alcohol abuse, even suicidal ideation. So this was all very disturbing to me. And I would also like to add that in my research, people who are mistreated because of this weight stigma at work seemed to not tell anybody.

10:47It was shameful and they were secretive about it and embarrassed. And if I can layer on just a little personal experience here, I've been in a larger body. I've been in a smaller body. So I've seen the ebbs and tides of how one is treated at work based upon body size. And earlier on in my career, I was absolutely mistreated, name called and bullied because of my weight in a professional space. And I was talking to my husband about this last week. We've been together for nearly 20 years. And I asked him, did I ever tell you about these experiences? Did I ever tell you about, you know, the time in the meeting when somebody said I was stupid, expletive, expletive, and then called me a fat something?

11:27I'm not going to repeat it. And he said, no, this is my best friend, my partner for life. I tell everything to, but I had never shared this, even though weight stigma and weight matters are such a large part of my research and my life so i carried that shame and secrecy with me and i perhaps should not have been surprised that it was happening so often at work and in such a secret fashion but nonetheless the prevalence the breadth and the secrecy of weight bias really rung the alarm bell for me that this is something we need to address in professional spaces yeah well there's a lot in there that I think we'll come back to.

12:05But Habib, tell us how you first recognized it as the problem it is. Personal experiences and some training I was doing while I was going through school, we did an implicit racial bias project. And as a African American woman in this country, I struggled to understand how these biases were seen as implicit because everything about my race is explicit. So through this project, we use the implicit association test and I took, you know, just playing around, took some tests and I took the weight bias test. And so when my test came back saying that, you know, I showed this level of weight bias, it started to help me better understand like, oh, OK, this bias can be implicit.

12:55It wasn't something I was aware of in myself, having always struggled with the idea of weight when I wasn't overweight, but I was made to feel like I was, and then being overweight. And so because of that, it mattered to me. I'm a healthcare professional. How can I have this implicit bias and not be aware if they're coming through in my behaviors or my actions when I'm caring for the people that are trusting me to care for them? So I became aware of my bias. It mattered to me to change the bias. So that's what I set out to do. Yeah, that's great. Hapiba, can you tell us about that work, about that experiment?

13:36Yeah. So like I said, I first started off kind of with the question of like how to affect, you know, weight bias, how can we decrease, you know, weight bias in healthcare? And I wanted to make an intervention to help people with their bias. But then I realized that no, people just need to be made aware. And so the intervention was designed to make people aware and to attempt to build empathy. We all know someone who is extremely small, way under what's considered a normal BMI, who struggled to gain weight. And if there's someone on one end... Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar, and vitamins.

14:20Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast.

14:55Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. The spectrum that's struggling to gain weight despite all they've tried, then there's the opposite end of spectrum of someone who's struggling to lose weight despite all that they have tried. And so because I set my goal on awareness, ultimately, you know, most people who participated in the research project felt like they were definitely more aware of what weight bias was. And it's something that they're thinking about more for sure. So tell us how your experiment affected your workplace. How did that all play out?

15:35So in the workplace specifically, one thing that I did see in my environment is working at a small university healthcare center. The building that we ran was antiquated and old. The rooms were small. The exam tables were itty bitty. And one of the providers had a larger body student come in and to get on the exam table. And the exam table tipped forward. as you kind of get on the table. And, you know, you can see the look of embarrassment on the student's face. So we had a conversation, you know, after our research as to what we can do about just even our space, you know, from just getting larger exam tables.

16:19And so that was one thing. And I don't know that without the research and without weight bias and weight stigma being on the forefront of our minds and going through the intervention, if, you know, something like that would have been so readily addressed. So, Grace, we, Amy B. and I both read the research roundup you wrote about weight at work. And among the many points that struck me was the finding that anti-fat bias, as you call it, is a prejudice that runs deeper than sexism, racism, and homophobia. What is that about? Oh, this is something that I had to spend a good amount of time untangling myself because I thought it was astounding that the world seems to be becoming better for a lot of marginalized groups, but not for people in larger bodies.

17:08And that's frustrating. But I did uncover three reasons that I think really demonstrate clearly why. And the first is weight compared to, let's say, your gender or your race is considered far more immediately controllable. I can't snap my fingers and change my race. And we have an adage in most cultures, eat less, move more, and the problem that is your larger body will be solved. The reality is far more complicated. So given that we think that weight is controllable and is a means toward realizing health for ourselves, it can feel natural, at least on the surface, to be judgmental about somebody's size.

17:54I'll also say that we have as a culture this idea of healthism that pervades how we think about what it means to be a good person or a bad person. So healthism is this idea. It's baked into many of our Western ideals of continuous self-improvement, responsibility for oneself, this idea that to be healthy, you have to be the model of health. And we think the model of health includes having a slim or slender body. And as a culture, we feel pretty comfortable day in and day out calling out people who do not conform to these values that we hold near and dear to ourselves. And so combined with this idea that health is controllable and you are a good person for pursuing health, beauty ideals and their pressures seem to have a real stronghold on how we think about ourselves and judge ourselves, not just other people.

18:52We internalize a lot of this. And I want to note this isn't a new phenomenon. It's always been in the water. It's all propel fitness water with Gatorade electrolytes, zero sugar and vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you? Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

19:33Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. It's been part of us and it's always been part of this broader conversation of currency and using our physical appearance as currency in society. So it's very hard for that to go away. Yeah. And this idea that it's a bias that we still find acceptable. At one point in your roundup, you talk about a possible intervention in a professional setting of someone just saying, regardless of our weight, we all deserve respect.

20:13And something about reading that sentence, I was like, why is that shocking to me? If you inserted regardless of our race, regardless of our gender, regardless of our sexual orientation, it would have been completely normal to my ear. But it almost felt like the first time I read something like that. And I might add there, we often don't show ourselves respect with respect to our body image. And so it made me feel unnatural to think about, oh, we're giving respect to people of all sizes because we don't give respect to ourselves unconditionally. It's tied oftentimes to our body size. And so we extrapolate that inner experience to our outer experience.

20:52Right. And the fact that our love for ourselves is conditional on our weight sounds sort of odd, saying it out loud, but it's 100 % my experience and certainly the experience of many women I know. We had one of our readers, a larger body woman who emailed us, and she says that she tends to avoid public facing opportunities, professional opportunities like presenting at a conference, you know, because she worries that people won't take her seriously. And I know this reflects, Grace, your research around people self-selecting out of professional opportunities. But I want to share what she wrote and just ask if you have any advice for her.

21:31So she wrote, not participating has limited my opportunities for advancement. I feel enormous pressure to look a certain way in order to get ahead. And so she's looking to hear how other larger bodied women are overcoming the self-doubt that she feels. Do you have either of you have any advice for her? I'll jump in here. I identify. I've been there. I could probably trace, you know, my decisions to go to academic conferences or seek out collaboration partners or Habiba to the research you're doing. to even go to my yearly exam at the doctor based upon how I felt about my body. So you're not alone.

22:08I've gone through therapy for these issues, and the two most kind of profound lessons that I've learned from therapy is opposite action. You recognize you're having a self-limiting belief. You're not wanting to lean into this opportunity, and you decide to do something the exact opposite so that you're not tacitly or explicitly confirming that the belief is something you need to act upon. So it's borrowing a page from mindfulness. You accept that you're having this self-limiting belief, but it doesn't mean that you have to act on it. And what I like to do for opposite action is I like to consider, you know, what are, in this context, my professional values?

22:47My professional values would be to display and communicate some expertise and collaborate with others by leaning into presenting at this conference, I'm fulfilling that value. And that can give me the boost, the motivation, the eagerness I need to say yes, when my brain is screaming in a very habitual way to say no. So opposite action is one thing. Sometimes that's too hard. So the second thing is if you hold a particular value of sharing and spreading your expertise and collaborating and participating in these public conferences is too much, what are other ways in which you can realize your values.

23:23So you're not leading a small life, a contained life, a life with really hard boundaries in it. How can you expand your boundaries just a little bit and live in a more, it sounds a little woo-woo, but it's really not. It's part of acceptance and commitment therapy. How can you live a life of value until you can build up that courage and excitement for doing opposite action? Grace, can you tell us what that looked like for you just to give us a demonstration? Yeah, sure. So for me, I'd have to think through one of my professional values, and that's really helping people learn self-regulation strategies, how to project manage themselves so they have lower stress and more mindfulness in their life.

24:06and I could for example do a big conference at my university where I invite a bunch of student groups to come and we talk about this we engage with one another I'm on stage the spotlight is on me for a sustained period of time and I just feel the cold spot running down my back the whole time because in the background my brain is thinking oh my gosh they're judging how I look they're judging how I look I do research on this I know that they're judging how I look and so it just creates a really tense situation within me. And so I, if I'm taking kind of the, I wouldn't say easier route, but my first step is to say, okay, if my passion is around teaching people how to self-regulate a little bit better, what are some other steps I can take while I learn to become aware of these self-limiting beliefs and kind of catch and release them back into the wild?

25:00And so for me, it was developing my own class at DePaul, which is just 30 students rather than 300 students so it's a smaller stage. Once I found the courage to do that then I developed a larger program with more students and more public facing events and so I grew that as a way to display opposite action to lean into the spotlight even when everything inside of me was saying go home hide in your condo don't show your body barely show your face on camera and go forth in the world so it was a process and it took took many years many years to get there. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things I notice about that is you're not getting rid of the fact that people will judge you.

25:40You know that that's going to be the case. It's more accepting that that's going to happen and still doing what you want to do anyway. Absolutely. And I'm loathe to tell people you must do this, but there is some internal work to do when you have these habitual impulses to lean out of life because of body consciousness and poor body image. It takes a lot of time and effort, and it's not what most people are doing, and so it can feel lonesome as well. But it's really the only way to confront those body-based, self-limiting beliefs. Sure. Habiba, what advice do you have for our listener? I share in her struggles.

26:23I think when you deal with the internalization, it's like your brain tells you that it's everybody. Everybody's talking about you. Everybody's judging everybody. And the reality is, and I had to remind, it's not everybody, but it may be, you know, a few individuals, you know, work with people told me, oh, you know, that people make me sick. they do this and I'm sitting here feeling like, are you looking at me? He's like, oh, well, not you, not you. Like, what do you mean? You know, that people can be so insensitive of your struggles. I find myself, you know, avoiding the camera, avoiding the outing.

27:02Like I want to possibly catapult myself into the world of expert speaking, you know, on this subject, but because I still have these struggles, you know, I've been less involved in trying to make that happen. But I have to remind myself, I think the more you accomplish things that you didn't think you could do, it just builds your confidence to do the next thing. So like Grace said, because I was thinking when she was talking, she created her own class, you know, of 30 people, something she was comfortable with. And that was my thought for this listener, take on something, create it. And then if she's able to do that and to step up there and to, it's sad to think that we have to do these things to kind of earn the respect and everything, but she gets up there and does the things she thinks she can't do, speaks her expertise.

28:00There's someone else in the audience that thought they couldn't do it. That's watching her do it. And now they're gaining the confidence that they can in turn do it too. And, you know, growing up as a marginalized minority in this country, like it's everything. Representation matters. It matters to someone doing something that you did not think was possible and do it. yeah right and so I just tell myself to do it to just do it like the bias is going to be there and the funny thing is is that with internalization the bias may not be there you know we internalize that it's there because we know that we are not what people are looking for that's what the world has told us and it's a lie it's a lie to think that someone prefers one aesthetic all the time.